Customer Reviews

Brossard - Leçons des morts / Gens · Lesne · Il Seminario musicale · Lesne

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

One way to evaluate a composer is to ask whether his/her music is 'generous' to its performers... gives them the notes they need to sound their finest, to shine in virtuosity, to thrill their audience. Composer<performers<audience; what you hear is what it is. Sebastien de Brossard was that kind of composer. There's nothing intellectually distinctive about his music; it's main-line French Baroque, but it sounds more gorgeous than it looks on the page. There isn't much of it on CDs, basically just this performance and another by Christophe Coin, which I've already reviewed.

Brossard's "Leçons des morts" and the "Dialogus poenitentis animae cum Deo" are structured as duet motets, and they are magnificently generous to the two singers in terms of vocal display. Of course, such music demands very skilled singers to be worth anything. Veronique Gens and Gérard Lesne are a superb duo. Their voices match exquisitely in timbre, as if the higher voice were an extension of the lower. Their tuning is sublime. Their phrasing is astonishingly blended in ensemble. I'd pay money to hear these two sing all 365 verses of "Row Row Row Your Boat" in canon. Remember the passage in Plato where "Aristophanes' maintains that humans were originally bisexual beings with two faces, and that people now spend all their lives looking to reunite with their other half? Gens and Lesne substantiate that notion; they've found their primeval unity.

Lesne rejects the labels 'countertenor' and 'falsettist.' Listening to him on this CD supports his position that he is really a "high tenor" with a natural extension of register into alto and even mezzo-soprano range. You'll hear him singing 'tenor' more of the time on these pieces by Brossard than on any other recording he's made, and his tenor is just as expressive and fluid as his alto. Whether or not he is using falsetto technique, his male alto sounds less 'false' and more natural than that of any of his competitors.

This is a "listener's joy" of a recording, but don't buy it yet! The whole CD is included as one of five in the Virgin Classics box-set of Gérard Lesne. The other disks include three "Leçons de Tenebres" by Marc-Antoine Charpentier (Wednesday, Thursday, Friday) and one of Nicolas Clérambault's Moets pour Saint-Sulpice. Beware of duplications! Two of the Charpentier disks have also been released together in a package that I reviewed some weeks ago. Gérard Lesne sings on all five CDs, but with different partners, including Sandrine Piau, Agnès Mellon, and various baritones and basses. Il Seminario Musicale is a consistently excellent ensemble; that name on a CD is a guarantee of musical pleasure.